


Troll Romance Needs Four Symbols

by arjache



Series: Pale Gleaming Scales [3]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Ashen Romance | Auspistice, Bloodplay, Caliginous Romance | Kismesis, F/F, Flushed Romance | Matesprits, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Quadrant Confusion, Quadrant Vacillation, Troll Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-30
Updated: 2012-12-30
Packaged: 2017-11-22 23:35:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,807
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/615649
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arjache/pseuds/arjache
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You look up and now instead of a puzzled expression she’s wearing a grin; it’s such a stupid grin full of stupid pointy teeth on her stupid pointy face and you just. Hate. It all.</p><p>And then you kiss her right on her stupid lips.</p><p>---</p><p>Rose and Terezi learn all about romantic quadrants.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sunsmasher](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunsmasher/gifts).



> In response to the prompt: “[Rose<3</<3Terezi] A relationship wherein they snipe at each other and lean on each other in varying measure, spend a lot of time being very smart, and grin with lots of teeth. I wouldn’t be adverse to some hurt/comfort between them, or maybe some fumbling attempts to define their relationship, or just straight, cutting-wit-filled fluff. No rating, explicit or pure as fresh snow are both fine, and I’m down with <3, <3<, or some quadrant flipping, so long as Terezi is compared to something pointy at least once. (that’s a joke you don’t have to do that)”

Your name is Rose Lalonde, and your moirail has just found you hiding in your room on the meteor, clutching a pillow.

You are, quite frankly, a fucking mess right now.

Terezi doesn’t say a word as she enters; she just climbs on your bed and sniffs at you. If you were a better moirail you’d probably have thought to have gone to her by now. But she seems to have sought you out instead.

You don’t bother breaking the silence either, until she licks your face, and you look up in mild surprise.

“Just as I thought,” she announces. “Your tears are as delicious as they are troubling.”

You snort and ruffle her hair, and she wrinkles her nose at you in response. “I hate to break this to you, Terezi, but I’m not actually crying,” you say.

“Not now. But I know you were. There was salt on your skin.”

You sigh and pull her closer to you. “Maybe a little,” you say.

“Wanna talk about it?”

You’re not sure you do, actually, but you know on some level that you should - it’ll be better for your mental health, probably. And Terezi can be awfully good at extracting information from you, if she’s in a playful mood. It’d probably be easier to just tell her.

Besides, this is what moirails are for, right? You think, anyway. You’re still kind of new to this. And while you enjoy the challenge, it’s a little confusing keeping things separate sometimes.

Some times, more than others.

You look down at your lap. “Kanaya and I had another fight,” you say. “She thinks we should spend some time apart to sort things out.”

“Oh, Rose,” Terezi says, squishing herself against your head and shoulders in a sort of impromptu hug. “I know the two of you have been having problems. But maybe now you can sort them out!”

“I guess. I don’t know,” you say. You’re equally adept at hiding behind verboseness or terseness, but right now you feel like you much prefer the latter.

“But?” she asks. Of course she heard the unspoken clause.

You sigh again and she gently pokes you until you respond. “But I’m fairly certain this is just a prelude to the end of the relationship,” you say eventually. “Since when has taking time off from a relationship ever resulted in people getting back together? There’s no real point to it. It’s just a formality. One apparently shared in both our cultures, despite all our romantic differences.”

“In fact,” you add, sitting up a bit more, “maybe I should just put an end to it now. Maybe I should just march right in there and break up with her.”

“Do you want that?” Terezi asks. Her voice is cool, collected. Precisely calculated to slow you down.

“Well. No,” you say, and then her stubborn silence prods you on. “I don’t want any of this. I don’t want us to break up. I don’t want to lose Kanaya. I love her. I just…I just don’t know what to do any more, and I don’t know if it even matters any more. I don’t think there’s anything either of us can do. Maybe we’re just destined to end up apart and that’s it.”

Terezi interrupts your rapid-fire angst-babbling with a well-timed _pap_ against the side of your head.

“Stop that,” she snaps. “There’s no point in it. If you’re so convinced this is your fate, well, then time will tell. You should know that better than most.”

You frown and crumple against her, feeling too spent to cry again but uncertain of what else to do. “I hate-”, you start to say, but Terezi shooshes at you, and you try to focus on the sound of that for a while. It’s a gentle, calming sound, and you can appreciate that.

But you still feel unsettled, and it nags at you.

You bury your face against Terezi’s soft, downy neck, seeking certainty in simple touch, and she breathes softly and just holds you for a while. Her skin is warm; a bit cool by human standards but still pleasant to the touch. Contact is nice right now.

Contact is _very_ nice right now.

You brush your lips against her neck experimentally. You can feel her pulse increase, and she exhales a little abruptly. You wait, and she rests her hand on your hair, and then you dare a little kiss, slightly further up her neck.

Terezi hums. It’s an ambiguous sound, and the vibration from it tickles at you through her skin. You want to marvel at that, but your reverie is cut short.

“Rose,” she murmurs to you, sounding a little sleepy, “just what exactly are you doing?”


	2. Chapter 2

“I don’t know,” you mumble back. It is both honest and dishonest at the same time, because while you’re technically not sure where you’re going with this, you suspect it’s something you’ve been craving for a while now. “Do you want me to stop?”

Terezi stirs a little, her fingers tapping experimentally at your hair. You wonder if she smells the reservation in what you said.

She is so awfully good at sorting out people’s motivations. And you are so awfully motivated right now.

“Mhmm. Keep going for now,” she finally says. There’s an oddly predatory tone in her voice now, like when she plays at being a lawyer - but this is different somehow. You tilt your head at her, a little curious now, and in response she tugs at your hair playfully.

Not one to back down from such an implied challenge, you duck your head back down and keep kissing at her neck, moving up slowly towards one of her ears. When you get there, you give her earlobe a playful nibble, and she squirms and runs her nails - more like claws, really - along your scalp.

The action is a bit too sharp for comfort, and you hiss at the pain, sudden annoyance flashing across your face. She giggles and then growls at you.

“I know you’ve been frustrated with me at times, Rose, but I didn’t know you outright _hated_ me,” she says, looking very pleased with herself. “You could have told me, you know. I don’t know how you hid it from me, but I hate that you did.”

She punctuates her sentence with a knee to your side.

“Ow!” you bark at her. “Terezi, I don’t hate you, but I damned well might if you keep on like that. What’s gotten into you?”

She stops and sniffs at you. “What’s gotten into _you_?”, she asks back. “I thought you wanted this.”

You are so confused right now.

“I just wanted to fool around a bit, okay?” You can feel your cheeks going red with frustration and embarrassment, and from the looks of Terezi’s twitching nose you suspect she’s noticed the same thing. “I mean, okay, I know that’s outside the scope of moirallegiance. And I know that was probably a very ill-advised thing for me to do right now. But you seemed interested.”

“I thought you were making caliginous advances at me!” Terezi says, scrunching up her face in an amplified mirror of your own frustration. “But no, it was red you wanted, wasn’t it? I can smell it all over your stupid face.”

“Terezi, that’s just my blood. I’m worked up right now, so my cheeks are flushed,” you say, and then wince at the poor choice of words.

“It’s both kinds of red and you know it!” she huffs at you. “Aaaargh. I can’t believe I was so stupid as to be one of _those_ people who’d risk their moirallegiance for another quadrant. It’s such an old story. I mean really! Moirails fail to calm each other. Their passions start to boil over.” She sits up, turning her back to you in the process.

You open your mouth to protest, but she spins around and pokes you in the chest. “And you! What were you thinking, Rose? Kanaya is still your matesprit! I don’t care if you think the relationship is doomed, you’re not going to help matters with infidelity! I’m not going to help you create some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy! That’s why I assumed you were hateflirting with me. Because I was foolish enough to assume that you weren’t going to be so irresponsible as to abandon your flushed quadrant so quickly. Clearly I was wrong.”

She is trembling with rage. It acts as a magnifying lens somehow, making her seem even more poised and dignified and dangerous than ever. If you were truly wise, you thought, you would probably just not say anything and let her work through it.

Maybe you’re still not feeling so wise tonight.

“You seem really upset right now,” you say calmly. “Angry.”

“You have no idea,” she says bitterly.

“Do you think maybe that’s leftover hatred from a few minutes ago? When we were fooling around?”

Yeah, definitely not so wise.

She glares at you. “Oh no no no no. You do not get to sit there and psychoanalyze me right now. Get out.”

“What?” you ask.

“OUT!” she yells, pointing dramatically at the wall several feet from the door.

You decide now is probably not the best time to correct her.

Instead you stand up and walk out of the room, slamming the door behind you. You stop just outside it in the hallway and fume. A few seconds later you hear the click of the lock sliding into place.

Wait a second.

You pound on the door. “Terezi! This is my room!”

Your name is Rose Lalonde, and you cannot believe you have just managed to ruin both of your relationships in a single night.


	3. Chapter 3

A week goes by without event. You are increasingly miserable; your mind keeps dredging up the horrible awkwardness of your semi-spurned advances, and just how much of an idiot you were for making them in the first place.

You spend most of it isolated; you retreat into your room and make a point of staying there most times when other people were likely to be up and moving around the meteor.

Dave starts bringing you your meals. You are grateful for the company.

At the one week mark, you notice Dave seems particularly upset when he brings you dinner. You debate asking him what’s going on, but he is extra-distant, even by Dave standards, and you can’t bring yourself to psychoanalyze him this time; Terezi's admonishment for your having done so with her still rings in your head.

Later that night, Terezi storms into your room.

“Forget everything I said. Let’s go for it,” she announces, and flings herself at you.

You dodge her at the last second, and she goes sprawling. You sigh and help her pick herself up off the floor.

“Sorry. Are you hurt?” you ask, brushing her off and checking for any obvious injuries as you do so.

“I’m fine! Bouncy. I want to bounce. You,” she says, babbling.

“What?”

“I want you to make human love to me. Messy, red, flushed human love to me.”

You wince. Is she mocking you? Is this her way of getting back at you?

If it is, you probably deserve it.

“Terezi…” you say in dismay, one hand pinching the bridge of your nose and the other still resting on Terezi’s side, vaguely near her hip, which she flexes suggestively. “This seems really ill-advised. Didn’t we go over this already?”

See? You’re being good. You are demonstrating that you have learned your lesson.

“Yes, and? Now I want it, and either you still do as well, or you don’t, so which is it?”

Terezi, on the other hand, seems to have skipped class entirely. Which is strange, seeing as how she was the one doing the teaching in the first place.

“I don’t know!” you exclaim. “Argh. Look, you can’t just come in here and try to seduce me in the very quadrant you lectured me about a week ago! Why would you do that? I’m sorry to have damaged our moirallegiance so much. I’m sorry to have put you in an unfair position like that. But this, really?” you say, fuming.

She looks up at you with those deceptively innocent red eyes of hers and a puzzled, slightly hurt expression on her face. “So…that’s a no, then?”

You cover your face in your hands and scream frustration through them. “I hate you so much right now.”

You look up and now instead of a puzzled expression she’s wearing a grin; it’s such a stupid grin full of stupid pointy teeth on her stupid pointy face and you just. Hate. It all.

And then you kiss her right on her stupid lips.

Clearly you must hate yourself as well.

There is an odd delay as she struggles to fully comprehend what is going on. You can almost hear the gears shifting in her head as she tries to process it.

You suppose you are being unfair here too. You’re not supposed to kiss people in the middle of an argument. You’re not supposed to kiss people you’re upset with.

Right?

Dear lord, what the hell quadrant are you even operating in any more?

You start to pull away from the rather one-sided kiss, but Terezi, noticing this, grabs your hair and _tugs_ on it. This is not the playful tug of last week. This is the sort of hair tug that involves searing follicle pain and brief flashes of color as your pain receptors shout so loud as to temporarily drown out your optic nerves.

She pulls you back into the kiss, hard. Your teeth clatter against hers; your upper lip almost catches on one of her fangs. Her breath is hot on your face and you are both panting.

The two of you linger there briefly, trying to get your bearings; you think you both moved faster than you could actually properly register. Finally she breaks contact, pulling away and inhaling deeply, though whether from a lack of oxygen or a desperate need to assess the situation, you’re not entirely certain. You stare at her blankly; you have no idea what happens next.

Then she winds up her fist and decks you in the jaw.

Ah. So that’s what’s next.

Once again you see stars, and you stagger backwards, stumbling over your bed and uttering a silent prayer of thanks that you landed there and not, say, the floor or an end table. Terezi leans over you to crow, but as soon as she realizes your condition, the anger on her face clears and is replaced by obvious concern.

She leans over and licks delicately at your jaw where a bruise is forming. The gesture is oddly canine, though you’re uncertain if that means dog or wolf in this case.

“Hey,” she says, poking at you. “Are you okay?”

You hiss at her and roll over on your side so that you’re facing away. “What do you even care?”

“Am I not allowed to worry about you any more? In my experience, you need a lot of worrying-after.”

“I don’t need your pity,” you say, and oh god _you keep making such bad word choices_.

There is a pause. “You’d rather my hate, then.” she says quietly.

You ignore the implied question. “Why did you show up and proposition me, anyway?” you ask. “What spurred that on?”

She doesn’t say anything in response. You roll back over and look at her, and the unpleasantness at dinner suddenly clicks in your head and now it all makes sense and it’s _even worse_.

“It was Dave, wasn’t it?” you say. Terezi stiffens in response.

_Got her._

You press further. “You had some sort of fight with him and now you’re trying to pull the same stunt I pulled a week ago. Do you have any idea how foolish of an idea that is? Do you have any idea how much of an idiot you are being right now?” you say.

Terezi stands up and starts walking away. “I shouldn’t have wasted my time on the likes of you,” she announces, her back to you. “You’re clearly not worth it. And you don’t have a monopoly on bad choices, either. Even if you do seem to keep doubling down on them!”

“I hate you too, Terezi,” you say, suddenly intent on having the last word. “Fuck you and the bizarrely segmented romance system you rode in on. Sorry I’m such a miserable failure at being a moirail, but right now the only thing keeping me calm is my searing hatred for you.”

She stops and turns back. “Say that again.”

You turn your head and say nothing, to spite her.

She pulls you up by the scruff of your collar and glares at you, her face inches from yours. “Say it, punk!”

“Fuck you.”

“Close enough,” she breathes, and slams you against the wall.


	4. Chapter 4

For one, glorious week, you both hate each other.

On Monday you walk by the common dining area; you were thinking of grabbing something to eat but you see Terezi again and it’s as if your head is a pot boiling over.

Instead you walk regally by and shove her face into the bowl of food in front of her.

Kanaya walks in at that moment, observes Terezi sitting up slowly, her hair dripping with nutritive sludge, observes the little specks of it on your shirt sleeve ( _of course Kanaya notices anything to do with your clothing_ ), but says nothing, and so you saunter idly by her on your way out of the room.

* * *

On Tuesday, Dave tells Terezi about Batman.

On Wednesday, you wake up tied to a chair with a note pinned to your chest for the “POL1C3”. You manage to slip out of the ropes and make yourself scarce before anyone finds you.

Before you go, though, you neatly coil the rope and fold the paper into a little origami cat, and then set both on the chair for her to find later. Because every villain needs a calling card.

* * *

On Thursday, after a particularly bloody scuffle, Terezi pins you to the bed and licks at your wounds so tenderly that you almost think she’s feeling romantic pity for you again.

Almost.

Until she starts smearing hot sauce into the scrapes and cuts.

* * *

On Friday the two of you play chase for hours and hours and attract rather more attention than you ought to have. The others are unimpressed with your flimsy, if elaborate, excuses as to why exactly you were threatening each other with weaponry and cackling with glee. On the other hand, you’re not sure they actually care; since when does Terezi not cackle with glee?

Later, you run your sharp thorns all over her pretty gray skin until she tells you where the remaining traps are.

Later still, you convince Kanaya to give you an impromptu haircut; she sighs and clucks maternally at you as she clips away the singe marks left by the one trap Terezi conveniently forgot to mention.

* * *

On Saturday, you sign your initials in teal on her back.

Not one to be outdone, she paints an elaborate impressionist landscape of a dragon destroying a small seaside town in red on your back.

You’re kind of dizzy after that one.

* * *

On Sunday, you’re both exhausted, and so you simply take turns lounging on each other at increasingly obnoxious angles, occasionally while loudly detailing your plans for each other’s demise, but increasingly in the midst of silence.

“Hey, Terezi?” you eventually ask, idly tapping your foot on her shoulderblades.

“Yeah?”

“I kind of miss being moirails with you,” you say.

She stops drumming on your shins. “Actually, I kind of miss that too.”

“Want to go back to that?”

“Do I still get to be obnoxious at you?” she asks, a cat-ate-the-canary grin on her face.

“I wouldn’t have it any other way,” you say, returning the grin.

* * *

Kanaya bursts into the room an hour later.

“Rose, Terezi, I am sorry but I cannot take it any more, you two have gotten way out of hand and I’m worried for…” she trails off as she looks around the room.

The two of you look up from where you sit calmly. Almost in unison, you and Terezi set down the books you were reading.

“I…” Kanaya stares at you uncertainly. “What exactly is going on here? I was of the impression you were pursuing some sort of furtive, destructive romance of a caliginous nature.”

You and Terezi exchange coy smiles at this.

“Oh, we were,” you say, standing up to greet Kanaya. “But we decided we liked being moirails better.”

“Oh. I. Um,” Kanaya says, looking sheepish and shuffling her feet. “Well, I should go-”

“Can I have a hug first? I’ve missed you,” you say.

“What? Oh, yes, of course,” she says, and you step forward and embrace her tightly. She hesitates for a second and then returns it with as much gusto, if not more so. “I missed you too,” she whispers in your ear, and you press your face against her shoulder for a moment.

As you withdraw from the hug, there’s a reluctance there, a brief flicker of disappointment that you would normally ascribe to wanting the hug to continue longer. But given what you’ve just seen…

“Kanaya,” you say. “Were you hoping to act as an auspistice between us?”

“Um,” she says, looking down, and oh good lord, she’s blushing green, a bright green backlit by her glow, and now the glow itself is getting brighter too.

An idea begins to form in your mind.

You take Kanaya’s hands in yours and smile at her. “Hey, Terezi?” you call out.

“Yeah?” she asks, from the other side of the room.

“What do you think about showing Kanaya everything we’ve learned so far about the romantic quadrants?”

“Ooh, I like it,” she giggles, and bounds over to where you and Kanaya are still standing. She hooks an arm around your waist. You grin at her, and then look back up at Kanaya.

“Well, what do you say?” you ask, and marvel as Kanaya’s blush moves two shades higher in intensity and slowly spreads across her cheeks.

“I…I’m flattered, Rose, but I wouldn’t want to intrude…”, she stutters.

Terezi wraps her other arm around Kanaya and stage-whispers at her conspiratorially. “Don’t worry, Kanaya. Rose and I are both very good teachers.”

And it proves to be a very good lesson indeed.

After that night, things go back to something resembling normal - you and Terezi as moirails-with-benefits, you and Kanaya as matesprits, or perhaps “Earth girlfriends” depending on the mood.

But every now and then the three of you still enjoy nights that, for lack of a better term, transcend the quadrants.


End file.
